Bulk Updating: State & Country

State

Movere provides the ability to bulk update a group of devices as either MSDN or Excluded. To access the bulk update menu, navigate to the IO\Device Tagging view and enter the applicable search criteria; this will display the bulk update option:

From there, selecting State to display the MSDN and Excluded options:

Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN)

MSDN is a set of online and offline services designed to help developers write applications using Microsoft products and technologies. Unlike most Microsoft products which are licensed at the guest or host device level, MSDN products are licensed via a user based MSDN subscription. Devices licensed via MSDN user subscription need to be identified and marked as ‘MSDN’. This override leaves the devices state as active, but excludes the Microsoft products installed on them from the device license counts. It also drives the MSDN user analysis by automatically adding the user(s) accessing MSDN designated devices to the list of users requiring an MSDN subscription. Alternatively, if a system is no longer being licensed via MSDN subscription, then removing this state will add the device back into the device licensing counts and remove the user(s) who were only touching this system and do not have any Visual Studio products installed on their workstation(s) from the list of users requiring an MSDN subscription. After checking (or unchecking) the MSDN checkbox, click the update button to apply:

Excluded

Movere automatically calculates the state of each device. States include Active, Disabled, Retired, Non-Windows, VMPoweredOff, etc. Only Active Windows, Linux and Hypervisor devices (ESX, Hyper-V) will be visible in the device tagging window. All other automatically calculated device states will be excluded.

There is only one way to override the state of a device Movere identifies as active and that is by using the ‘Excluded’ option. This option is primarily used for excluding templates, Cluster-Aware Updating (CAU) accounts, Exchange Database Availability Group (DAG) accounts, SQL Distributed Transaction Coordinator (DTC) accounts, SQL cluster accounts, etc. These objects can all appear as Active devices in Movere, but must be excluded to eliminate the erroneous impact these objects have on coverage.

When excluding any device, it’s important to track why the exclusion was performed. To facilitate this, Movere provides the user with the ability to create ‘Exclude Reasons’. Users can create as many exclude reasons as needed and once created they can be assigned to excluded objects. To create an Exclusion Reason, click on the ‘Exclude Reasons’ option at the top of the Device Tagging page:

In the text box that appears the user can name the exclusion reason. Clicking on the ‘+’ symbol next to it will make it available for assignment:

To delete an exclusion reason, click on the ‘x’ symbol. Deleting an exclusion reason will also remove it from any device(s) it has been assigned to.

Below is an example of the exclusion of cluster accounts:

The number of excluded device objects can be tracked by reason from the Summary\Cyber Security\Devices view. If there are excluded device objects in multiple domains, then they will be grouped at a domain level first:

Selecting one domain will then group exclusion by reason:

Country

In addition to custom tags, Movere can also group devices by Country adding another dimension to filter on to access device and license counts. While Movere is able to geographically place devices that can access the Internet, these placements may not always be accurate due to gaps in public IP data released by ISPs. Using Movere, each device, including physical non-Windows hypervisors, can be assigned to a Country.

Grouping devices by Country allows Movere users to see device and license counts by country, across multiple countries, or globally. Just like assigning a device to a custom Tag, you can map devices to a country from the Bulk Update menu. Similar to a Tag, a device can only be mapped to one country at a time: